Google Cloud customers spinning up new Tensor Processing Unit VMs for AI workloads will notice something different beginning today, as Canonical has finally released certified Ubuntu images for TPU instances going all the way back to 2023’s v5e. Canonical and Google announced the release of certified Ubuntu images for TPU VMs in a press release penned by Canonical’s public cloud alliance director Hugo Huang today. Huang noted in the statement that certified Ubuntu images for TPU7x, v6e, v5p, and v5e are now the default whenever a TPU VM is created in Google Compute Engine. If you’re wondering what the big change is here, it’s basically about how Ubuntu in TPU VMs is supported. Huang told The Register that, prior to today, customers using TPU v5 and v6 were running a custom version of Ubuntu 22.04, but it was one that Google itself modified and managed. As of this announcement, those v5 and v6 instances are now running on Canonical-certified and supported versions of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that are compatible with existing production environments. That, ideally, means that migrating to the new version should happen without interrupting existing workloads, Huang explained. While this was not specifically mentioned in the announcement, Huang told us that TPU7x instances will be running on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and noted that both 22.04 LTS and 24.04 LTS have been tested across all three generations of TPUs to give Google Cloud customers some flexibility in their deployment choices based on workloads. "Ubuntu LTS gives enterprises the stable, secure foundation they need to move AI workloads from experimentation into production on Google's most advanced accelerator hardware,” Huang told us in an email. “This launch makes Cloud TPU as accessible as any other VM on Google Cloud — same console, same experience, backed by up to 15 years of Canonical security maintenance and support commitment." Canonical has worked closely with Google to ensure that certified Ubuntu images work properly with existing machine learning tools found in TPU VMs, like JAX, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and the like, as well as automation and monitoring tools like Kubernetes, and support for Snap packages. As both TPU VM-certified builds are long-term support variants, the pair will get five years of support maintenance, which is typical for Ubuntu LTS builds. In addition to broader support from Canonical, Huang said that TPU VMs will be getting a security boost in the form of access to Ubuntu Pro services that automate security tasks. Ubuntu Pro was already available on Google Cloud, for those wondering, but its presence in Cloud TPU VMs will likely be a welcome addition for the security-conscious enterprise AI customer. Ubuntu Pro includes things like live kernel patching, security support for open-source packages and out-of-the-box hardening. Unlike the rest of today’s announcements, however, this one isn’t available now: You’ll need to wait until Q3 to get access to Ubuntu Pro in TPU VMs - unless you ask, that is. “Customers wanting early access to Ubuntu Pro can reach out to Canonical sales or their Google Cloud account team directly,” Huang told us. Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait and hope that the existing security offerings in the certified Ubuntu LTS versions rolled out today are sufficient to protect those AI workloads. ®

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De bezuinigingen in de langdurige zorg worden uitgesteld tot na 2027, meldt een woordvoerder van minister Mirjam Sterk (Langdurige Zorg). Door binnen het ministerie te schuiven met geld worden in dat jaar bezuinigingen van 170 miljoen euro ongedaan gemaakt. Dat neemt niet weg dat uiteindelijk jaarlijks 1 miljard euro gaat worden bezuinigd op de langdurige zorg.

De ongedaan gemaakte bezuinigingen voor volgend jaar betreffen één maatregel die is genomen door het vorige kabinet-Schoof en twee maatregelen van kabinet-Rutte IV. CDA'er Sterk wil zo tegemoetkomen aan moties van Mirjam Bikker (ChristenUnie) en Lisa Westerveld (GroenLinks-PvdA).

Het uitstellen van de bezuinigingen wordt betaald uit extra geld dat eigenlijk bedoeld was voor zorginstellingen. Het idee was dat de instellingen zo hun financiële reserves konden aandikken. Die tariefverhoging heeft Sterk uitgesteld, omdat ze vreesde dat zorginstellingen het geld vooral zouden gebruiken om winst te maken of om onnodig veel te sparen.

UITHOORN (ANP) - Voorstanders en tegenstanders van de komst van een asielzoekerscentrum demonstreren donderdagavond in Uithoorn. Enkele honderden anti-azc-betogers liepen in een mars vanaf de beoogde locatie van de opvang naar een plein bij het gemeentehuis, waar PVV-leider Geert Wilders spreekt.

Tegenover het plein, naast het gemeentehuis, staan tientallen demonstranten die juist voor het azc zijn. Ze hebben spandoeken bij zich met teksten als 'Mijn Nederland is gastvrij', 'Welkom iedereen' en 'azc hoezee'. Ze roepen 'refugees are welcome here'. Tussen de beide groepen staat de ME opgesteld en is de weg afgezet.

Op het plein bij de tegenstanders van het azc hangen grote Nederlandse vlaggen. Veel mensen hebben ook een vlag bij zich en bloemen in de hand. Uit een speaker klinkt 'we zeggen nee, nee, nee, tegen een azc'. Ook is de Prinsenvlag te zien. Die werd vroeger onder meer door de nazistische NSB gebruikt en duikt de afgelopen jaren vaker op bij protesten tegen de komst van asielzoekers. Een groepje scandeert leuzen naar de voorstanders van het azc.

PARIJS (ANP) - Aryna Sabalenka heeft de derde ronde bereikt op Roland Garros. De nummer 1 van de wereld uit Belarus won in twee sets van Elsa Jacquemot uit Frankrijk: 7-5 6-2.

Sabalenka jaagt nog op haar eerste titel in Parijs. Vorig jaar verloor ze de finale van de Amerikaanse Coco Gauff.

Tegen Jacquemot, de nummer 67 van de wereldranglijst, leverde Sabalenka in de eerste set een keer haar opslagbeurt in. Ze won die van de Française twee keer. In de tweede set overleefde ze zelf in haar eerste game drie breakpoints en won ze twee keer de service van haar tegenstander. Nadat ze haar eigen opslagbeurt nog een keer inleverde, brak ze meteen terug en benutte haar eerste matchpoint.

Robinhood is launching beta support for a new feature that will let AI agents make payments and trade stocks on users' behalf. The company is also rolling out a virtual credit card for AI agents, with spending limits and approval controls. TechCrunch reports: Robinhood said users on its platform can now create a separate account for their AI agents and connect them to a dedicated wallet. While these agents would be able to read and analyze users' portfolios to come up with trading strategies and suggest investments, they'll only be able to access the pre-loaded balance in the dedicated wallet to place orders.

Users will get notifications of all trades their AI agent makes and will be able to monitor their activities within the Robinhood app. For some trades, agents will show a preview that users may have to approve before the order is executed. The company said it has also built in fraud detection protection, in which a team from Robinhood would review suspicious trades and help users resolve disputes.

Robinhood says users can connect their AI agents to its Model Context Protocol (MCP) service to do things like analyze concentration risk and sector exposure, execute trades, or look through analyst notes to identify new investment opportunities across various sectors. The agentic trading feature is launching in beta and only allows stock trading right now. The company says it plans to add support for options, crypto, event contracts, futures, and prediction markets soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud on Wednesday, alleging that he made $1.2 million off of bets using insider information on Polymarket. Prosecutors claim that Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google, used confidential information to place trades correctly betting that singer d4vd would be Google's most searched person in 2025. Spagnuolo has been charged with money laundering, commodities fraud and wire fraud. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, was unsealed on Wednesday.

Spagnuolo was arrested Wednesday morning in New York, ABC reported. "Spagnuolo had access to Google's internal data systems, including a particular Google internal software tool that provided him access to confidential, nonpublic Year in Search data," the prosecutors said in their complaint. Some observers of the Polymarket platform flagged the user "AlphaRaccoon" back in December for suspicious trades on the most searched person contracts. The complaint Wednesday said that Spagnuolo was the person behind that account. "Google officially and publicly announced its Year in Search 2025 results on or about December 4, 2025. Soon after it did so, Spagnuolo's AlphaRaccoon account, profited approximately $1.2 million on his Google Year in Search 2025-related bets," the complaint said.

[...] Spagnuolo is also facing a civil case from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he's charged with insider trading. The complaint detailed that Spagnuolo correctly predicted the outcomes of a slew of other search markets, including contracts like "Will Zohran Mamdani rank in the Top 5 most searched" and "Will Squid Game be the #1 searched TV show." "Spagnuolo misappropriated the material Confidential Information by knowingly or recklessly using it to trade the 2025 Year in Search List Contracts in breach of his duties of trust and confidentiality," the CFTC complaint alleged.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 2026 F1 Sim Racing World Championship concludes with Round 12, where the racers will take on the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

McLaren's Oscar Piastri has received the unique honour of having a newly-discovered species of wasp named after him.

How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them alphabetically into a collection called the Backward Index.

The Backward Index evidently turned out to be a useful tool in the pre-electronic age. For example, it could help identify a set of related terms that should be defined in similar ways, including open compounds (Highland pony, Shetland pony, Welsh pony), closed compounds (blocklike, clocklike, rocklike, socklike, chalklike), and morphologically related terms (phytopathological, ethological, lithological, ornithological). Thus, looking up all the diseases that end in –itis or all the doctrines and theories that end in –ism was now possible. Since rhymes depend on word endings, initial research for a rhyming dictionary also made use of the Index, where sequences such as seepy, steepy, weepy, sweepy and dorty, forty, shorty, snorty, porty, sporty, rorty, torty show up regularly.

The index of reversed words eventually grew to 315,000 entries, each one typed up by one of M-W’s many typists.

We do know a few facts. One is that they were typed up. They were typed up by the typist and I interviewed several retired Merriam-Webster employees, at least a couple of them in their 90s. And they all recall this work. They all recall the file and they say, well, that’s what the typists did when there was no manuscript for them to type. When in the process of making the Unabridged Dictionary, for example, there was an enormous amount of copy at the beginning of the project. But then as the typesetting went on, what happened was through revision and later stages of editing, there was less and less and less of the actual manuscript to type. And that left some of the typing pool available to do other projects. And their assignment was to, when they had the time, to type the headwords in the dictionary backwards.

Here are some more examples of entries from the Backward Index:

(thx, margaret)

Tags: dictionaries · language · video

On The Fuel Efficiency of Launching My Enemies Into The Sun. Incredibly nerdy and fun: does it require more power to eject a person from the solar system or launch them into the Sun?

Speaking in West Bank settlement, Israeli PM, who is fighting for political survival before elections, says ‘we are squeezing Hamas’

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Benjamin Netanyahu has said he has given orders to the Israeli army to seize control of 70% of the Gaza Strip in a move that threatens to torpedo an already fragile ceasefire and create catastrophic humanitarian conditions in the already devastated territory.

Under the US-brokered ceasefire in October, the Israeli army withdrew to a demarcation line which gave Israel direct control of 53% of the occupied territory. Since then, Israeli forces have steadily advanced their positions westward into the Hamas-controlled half of the strip, and declared an ever-expanded no man’s land west of that, within which they claim the right to decide who can enter and open fire on anyone perceived as a threat.

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"Wethouder, doe er iets aan." Dagelijks krijgt wethouder Pascal Lansink-Bastemeijer mails, appjes en brieven van Rotterdammers die gek worden van toeterende en ronkende auto’s in de binnenstad. Nu komt Rotterdam met een maatregel die nergens anders in Nederland wordt getest: een geluidscamera die herriemakers automatisch moet kunnen beboeten.

conspectus_bs posted a photo:

Kodak Portra 400 with Mamiya RB67 and Sekor 50 mm

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Dit tijdsgewricht gilt om ridders, maar ridders hebben maliënkolders en harnassen (en schilden en zwaarden, maar dit terzijde), en willekeurige knapen die zich toevallig op Rotterdam Centraal bevinden niet, en dat is dus een beetje een probleem. Is iemand eindelijk zo dapper om het op te nemen voor twee meisjes die zonder aanleiding worden uitgescholden door twee mannen, blijken de mannen onderdeel uit te maken van een roedel, die vervolgens op de held van de dag duikt om hem te mishandelen en te beroven. Alle verdachten zijn inmiddels gevonden, behalve deze knakker (met intens lelijk Gucci-petje), die een dag later in de coffeeshop doodleuk afrekende met de pinpas van het slachtoffer. Wie biedt?

De parlementaire enquête naar het coronabeleid begint vrijdag onder een slecht gesternte. Talloze commissieleden kwamen en gingen en over het onderzoeksvoorstel werd gesteggeld. Kan de commissie haar werk nog effectief doen? „Het succes van de commissie hangt af van onderling vertrouwen.”